24 January 2015

HOWTO -- downloading an EPUB from Google Play Books


So a bunch of people have had trouble getting to the "Download EPUB" functionality with Google Play Books when trying to get their archive copy of The March North.

  1. If you are logged in to Google with a Google Account other than the account that bought the book, log out.  (Google gets confused about whose books to show you.)
  2. Log in to Google with the Google Account that bought the book.
  3. Navigate to  https://play.google.com/books
  4. In the left-hand vertical stack of options, click on My Books
  5. Next to the title of the book under the cover icon, there's a stack of three gray dots with hover text Options
  6. Click on the three dots; a menu will appear
  7. Select Download EPUB from the menu.
And there you go.  If the publisher put the book up using Adobe DRM, you're going to have a little stub with a permalink that goes to a DRM management setup.  In the case of The March North (and expected subsequent Tallwoods Books ebooks) you're going to have an DRM-free EPUB file.

Updated: you don't have to hover-the-cover to get the three dots anymore, they're next to the title of the book under the cover icon.

2 comments:

Danny Sichel said...

I don't suppose I could Paypal or Interac you some cash directly and in exchange you send me the .epub ?

Graydon said...

That's a non-trivial tax nightmare I'd really rather not have.

Sorry!